Opening Night
6-9 PMThe official kick-off event of LAABF 2026 and first opportunity to visit the Fair!
The Opening Night lineup is produced in collaboration with Orange Radio & Homebody.
sonrisita
leavemieralone
leelee
Opening Night tickets are $30 and include a limited-edition artwork by Amia Yokoyama, plus multiple re-entry throughout the Fair weekend. Purchase your ticket here to support this nonprofit event.
Project Spaces
¡Afuera! Publishing Queer Liberation—From the Collection of Archivos Desviados (PR 5) traces the underrecognized network of influences and connections between three activist coalitions of the 1970s: the Gay Liberation Front of New York and the Third World Gay Revolution, two groups that emerged in post-Stonewall New York, and the Frente de Liberación Homosexual of Argentina, Latin America’s first political action group for gays and lesbians. Featuring rare magazines, newsletters, posters, flyers, mockups, and original documents, this survey—previously exhibited at Printed Matter in 2025—marks the first LA presentation of many of these works. Materials are drawn from Archivos Desviados, an ongoing, independent archive project now based in New York and founded by Argentinian-born archivist Juan Queiroz. Presented by Printed Matter.
Bread & Puppet Press (PR 8) presents We Who Are Not Dead Yet, an installation of protest prints that links the anguished imagery of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–1516) to the violence of empire. At its center are the Isenheim Studies—64 masonite relief prints carved by Bread & Puppet co-founder Peter Schumann in 1962 and paired with his 2024 text written in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The exhibition also includes prints from the 1960s made in response to the war in Vietnam, as well as large poppies printed in the summer of 2025 for the Domestic Resurrection Revolution in Progress Circus and Pageant. We present this work at a moment when the machinery of war continues to widen: the expansion of Israeli military violence across the region, and the U.S.–Israeli assault on Iran that has already dropped thousands of bombs, causing widespread devastation and civilian casualties. These works insist that such violence is not an exception but a constant condition of imperialism.
Chicano in Print (PR 4) examines the design and visual culture of Chicano independent publications from the 1960s and 1970s. The publications on view used Spanish-language mastheads, bold typefaces, and symbols drawn from Mexican history to communicate cultural identity and movement ideology. This exhibition traces how these design decisions created a shared visual language for the Chicano movement, both in Los Angeles and across the country. The aim is to inspire future designers, scholars, and students by highlighting the revolutionary visual work of this transformative era. Presented by Alexandria Canchola and Joshua Duttweiler.
Ooga Booga presents Emily’s Sassy Lime: The G.U.S.T.O. B-sides Redux (PR 9), an installation of archival materials from the scrappy mid-90s SoCal band, Emily’s Sassy Lime (E.S.L.). Comprising three high school students, Emily Ryan, Amy Yao, and Wendy Yao, E.S.L. formed their sound mostly over the phone and by snail mail, since the bandmates lived far from each other and initially weren’t old enough to drive. They borrowed instruments, hitched rides, snuck out to shows, and released records on Kill Rock Stars after the label owner heard their song on a mutual friend’s answering machine. Following a recent and more expanded exhibition at Orange County Museum of Art, The G.U.S.T.O. B-sides Redux encompasses ephemera from their extensive collection of “junks”—flyers, letters, photos, films, and other artifacts of Asian girlhood before Y2K. Accompanying the installation is a table by E.S.L. member Wendy Yao, whose Chinatown LA bookstore, Ooga Booga, features the release of new publications from the band members and more.
Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive, City (PR 2) is a project space organized by The Getty Research Institute that highlights Ed Ruscha’s iconic ongoing photographic documentation of Los Angeles. Carried out over six decades on many of the city’s major thoroughfares, the archive constitutes an unparalleled visual chronicle of both notable and everyday sites in L.A., including popular music venues, neighborhood restaurants, and billboards promoting Hollywood’s latest blockbusters. Ruscha’s photographs of Los Angeles streets from 1965 to today are the subject of a new digital and print publication by the Getty: Ed Ruscha's Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive, City.
Marta (PR 7) presents Vince Skelly's Book Stools in the courtyard of the LA Art Book Fair. The installation exhibits a series of new functional sculptures by the Claremont-based artist Vince Skelly: hand-carved and shaped stools made of California redwood, a material frequently used by the artist. The sculptures are single-title bookshelves that simultaneously act as a perch upon which to read their contents; the books are an intrinsic part of the sculptures that house them. Book Stools marks the gallery's first solo outing with Skelly and its inaugural presence at the Fair as non-booksellers.
RISO Studio Arts (PR 6) presents A History of RISO in Art: an exhibition featuring vibrant risograph prints created from archival photographs documenting the Japanese RISO Kakagu Corporation’s history from 1945 to present day. The corporation invented the risograph as well as other screenprinting technologies such as GOCCO and MiScreen. RISO Studio Arts is an official distributor for their equipment. The presentation reflects on the significant role risograph printing has played in global zine culture, art book fairs, and independent publishing communities. During the Fair, visitors can also participate in hands-on workshops with live risograph and screenprint demonstrations in the Project Space.
Three Star Books (PR 3) and Paint It Black, Torino, join forces for ON SET, a special presentation dedicated to artists’ books. A selection of titles from both publishing houses will be displayed on a large black table, each volume individually illuminated by a dedicated projector. The installation evokes a film set poised for action, where every book appears as a protagonist awaiting their close-up. Participating artists include Ruby Sky Stiler, Daniel Gordon, Jonathan Monk, Simon Starling, Iris Touliatou, and Ambra Pittoni, among others.
Werkplaats Typografie (PR 1) presents Visit Arnhem. An evolving billboard campaign portrays the Dutch city of Arnhem through various local advertisements. Continuously over-pasted, the project forms a shifting portrait of the city, moving between promotion and reflection. In this campaign, we portray the local as global, asking the question: what makes a city?
Reading Room
The LAABF 2026 Reading Room focuses on the politics of sound, drawing inspiration from publishers who use the print medium to explore the relationship between sound, geography, and ecology. The installation features newly commissioned works by a select group of exhibitors, as well as a series of videos and listening stations. Additional Fair participants will contribute titles related to this theme for a collective reference library hosted in the space. A series of custom modular cushions, produced by the multi-disciplinary design studio groupsports, create a non-hierarchical “social floor” for gathering, using reclaimed latex, wool, and fabric from LA County’s post-industrial waste streams. In contrast to the rapid speed at which visitors move through the Fair, this program offers an alternative space to engage in close reading, listening, research, and reflection.
In this year’s Reading Room, sound functions as both a sensory medium and a political instrument, tracing how landscapes are shaped by power, memory, and displacement. Works like Aventures LTD.’s cassette edition foreground the circulation of music as a form of intimate, portable archive within diasporic networks, where sound becomes a vessel for belonging across fractured geographies. Metabolic Studio’s interactive sonic map of LA’s Owens River Valley (Payahuunadu) uses wind, animals, and industrial disturbance as testaments to the ecological consequences of human intervention, making audible the otherwise invisible entanglements between extraction, habitation, and environmental degradation. Across the border, Cynthia Magazine pays homage to the genre of Música Regional Mexicana, while Living Earth’s bioregional recordings catalog years of site-specific performances in response to west coast ecologies by a network of artists and activists. From there, F.A.G. Archive’s collection of photocopied facsimiles outline how trans communities endured the HIV/AIDS crisis and what relics they leave behind, both in print and in recordings of poetry readings. In these practices, sound attunes to both social and geological formations, as well as the political conditions that reshape them, like in Khabar Keslan’s account of how a sacred mountain in South Lebanon has been redefined by Israeli militarization and surveillance.
Publishing, in its expanded forms—music, magazine, archive, installation—threads together interdisciplinary projects and makes the relationships between artist, medium, and public more legible. It constructs a shared space of attention around political questions, from settler-colonial land transformations to queer and trans histories, and from post-industrial material reuse to evolving musical traditions. Altogether, the works in this Reading Room frame publishing as a collective, relational act: one that anchors artistic practices in local political realities while also creating international audiences through collaboration and circulation.
Contributions include:
Hand to Hand is a new cassette tape edition by Aventures LTD. (A22). The project draws inspiration from histories of bootleg mixtapes exchanged by family and through travel across the Palestinian diaspora. It pays homage to the preciousness of music as a souvenir, especially for people displaced or in exile. Hand to Hand is a collaboration with UNIBROW SUN and Glue Factory, and is assembled by Sabri Sundos, Michelle Nazzal, and Andrew Miller.
Cynthia Magazine (H29) pays tribute to their latest issue’s cover star, Chino Pacas, whose music is transforming the genre of Música Regional Mexicana.
F.A.G. Archive (I4) presents a visual representation of life-between-the-lines through a display of photocopied archival ephemera. The installation features a living altar dedicated to trans ancestors and victims of AIDS, and includes audio of excerpted poetry readings.
groupsports contributes an iteration of their project, Social Floor: a series of modular cushions offering varying formations for different social functions. Taking cues from the majlis مجلس sitting room, the cushions create a gathering space that’s low to the ground, soft, and non-hierarchical. This edition is inspired by ablaq أبلق, an architectural technique that alternates soft limestone and black basalt used in the Damascus courtyard typology. Designed responsively to materials available in LA County post-industrial waste streams, this set is made from reclaimed latex, wool, and fabric.
Metabolic Studio (D8) presents Payahuunadu Interactive Sound Map, a work that transmits sounds produced by animals, geological phenomena, and human activities recorded by Metabolic Studio around Payahuunadu, also known as the Owens Valley. The listener is able to combine and isolate site specific field recordings as a way to experience the unintended yet pervasive effects of human-made, artificial sounds on the ecosystem surrounding the Owens Dry Lake Bed. The study of sonic landscapes can reveal invisible networks of interdependence throughout the natural world.
Khabar Keslan Magazine (H28) explores the relationship between the residents of the Bekaa Valley and South Lebanon with Jabal al-Shaykh, the mountain overlooking their communities. The project builds on ongoing research and traces how local perceptions of the mountain are shifting from that of a sacred, life-sustaining landscape to a relationship marked by distance, restriction, and surveillance amidst ongoing Israeli settler-colonial expansion.
Living Earth presents a multi-media exploration of Los Angeles’ bioregions through an archive of outdoor performances. The installation features recordings of live music, an eco-surrealist plein air portrait, film, photos, and other ephemera that expand upon their ongoing collective practice of site-specific gatherings around music, performance, and ecology.